Through Borrowed Eyes
by Picklesticks
Summary: Kakashi and Itachi, through the years. Gen.


A/N: Written for the September round of Naruto Flashfic.

* * *

Kakashi was aware of Itachi from the moment the Uchiha entered ANBU. There was an aspect of pride in his notice of the younger nin – Kakashi himself had been hailed as a young genius for almost all his life. His promotion to jounin and subsequent entry into ANBU had been delayed, though, due to the… issue… with his father.

To enter ANBU at fifteen was still impressive, though, and Kakashi had attracted quite a bit of notice when he had. As much as he tried to act as though it were below him to notice such things, as much as he tried to pretend that he was nothing more than another nin, closed off and hard and not needing such things as recognition for his accomplishment, he still ate it up when people did notice, when he got just a little extra praise for doing well. It was… something.

And then it stopped, because Itachi entered ANBU, and suddenly he was the new darling. "The Uchiha genius," people called him, and Kakashi faded into yet another member of the faceless ranks of Black Ops.

He would never admit it was jealousy. If anyone noticed his wariness of the younger nin, they most likely assumed it was just a remnant of the issues he'd had with the Uchiha after he'd returned from the bridge mission less a teammate and plus a new red eye.

--

He was assigned to the cleanup crew that handled the Uchiha district in the aftermath of the massacre, and he was rather unsurprised by what had happened. Not that he had truly been expecting Itachi to kill everyone who shared his blood, save for the little boy who was currently under intensive treatment at the hospital for the aftereffects of the jutsu used on him, as well as the shock and mental trauma of finding his entire clan annihilated. He'd expected _something, _though. Word from the rest of Itachi's unit was that he'd been brooding quite often of late, and occasionally they'd been unable to find him. He'd missed briefings.

To Kakashi, and most likely to others of ANBU was well, those were danger signs. The Sharingan came with an inherent risk of mental instability, a byproduct of the consanguinity that was required to keep the bloodline limit a dominant trait of the Uchiha, and Kakashi knew that the risk had been multiplied by Itachi's young start, by the intense pressure to succeed he would have been under. And ANBU… ANBU was not a place for children. Fifteen was young to enter. To become a member of the elite corps, to be sent on the darkest, most soul-killing missions, at twelve years of age… down that road lay madness, and madness indeed had come to roost.

As he and the rest of his unit combed through the district, looking for any clues about what might have set off the Uchiha genius, or any evidence of where he might have fled to, Kakashi looked at the slaughtered bodies of all the clan members – shinobi in their prime, civilians who had never held a kunai in their lives, the elderly who might once have been warriors but now posed little threat to anyone, children cut down before they could have a chance to blossom – he wondered if Itachi had blamed his entire clan for his fast rise, for exposing him to the pressures of ANBU at far too young an age.

An infant, no more than a month or two old, was slid from belly to throat. He stared at the little, ruined body and shook his head.

--

He had not though overmuch about Itachi in the intervening years, not until that sole survivor of the massacre wound up in the first team to pass the bell test. The traumatized little boy he remembered from the reports had grown into a closed-off, bitter preteen – hardly surprising. But Kakashi was very gratified to note that Sasuke, while intelligent, didn't show any signs of the same level of destructive genius his brother had manifested. The poor kid didn't need any help getting further into the 'at-risk' category he was already in.

Memories of the bloodbath in the Uchiha district made Kakashi concentrate on Sasuke, at times to the exclusion of his teammates. While he hadn't been particularly fond of Itachi even before the massacre, he didn't want to see Sasuke go down the same road, and it seemed all too likely, given that the pressures of being a genius were probably even less than the mental trauma of having been caught in said genius' bloody breakdown.

Having Orochimaru sniffing around didn't exactly help matters either.

And then Itachi reappeared in the village, and Kakashi found out that apparently having gone at least temporarily insane hadn't dulled the man's skills any. The sense of competition he'd had back in those early days, when Itachi had taken his spotlight as the genius of ANBU, reasserted itself and he spent the days after the encounter with Tsukiyomi quiet and closed-off, smarting from the easy defeat and determined to find a way to get the Mangekyou for himself. He was not a blood Uchiha – he had no idea if he could even do it. He'd gained the third tomoe, though, and if he could evolve the Sharingan a little, he should be able to evolve it a lot.

He would not let Itachi do that to him again.

--

He got the Mangekyou, all right – and some selfish part of him was relieved that Naruto and Sakura had both found other teachers, so he could focus himself on that little obsession until it was completed. But he never had a proper chance to use it against Itachi, to test whether he could finally put him in his place as he'd been longing to do since Itachi was twelve and newly in his mask.

In the middle of the fight against that… that strange _someone, _he hadn't fully had the time to appreciate what it meant, that Sasuke had won and Itachi was dead. It wasn't until they returned to Konoha and Naruto stopped brooding over having missed Sasuke that it really sank in – Itachi was dead.

Either there had been a tremendous upset – and that was unlikely, he knew – or Sasuke had legitimately outclassed his brother. And that… that was a disturbing thought.

Kakashi rubbed his Sharingan eye and wished he'd never heard the name 'Uchiha.'


End file.
